Locked in Flood Risk: Housing Precarity, Rental Deposits, and Climate Immobility in Seoul
Introduction
“A lucidly woven class allegory of ascent and descent, at once biting and sorrowful.”
— Lee Dong-jin, translated by the author (Lee, 2019)
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite stages inequality in Seoul through a vertical geography of ascent and descent. This spatial imagination becomes especially powerful in the film’s rainstorm sequence: the same downpour that merely interrupts an upper-class family’s camping trip becomes a devastating flood for a low-income family living in a semi-basement apartment downhill. The scene shows, with unusual clarity, that flood damage is not simply a matter of rainfall. It is mediated by class, housing, and the built environment. In this sense, Parasite offers more than a cinematic metaphor for inequality. It captures a broader problem of urban climate vulnerability: environmental hazards do not fall on a socially flat landscape.
This paper begins from that insight. Climate-related hazards such as heavy rainfall, heat waves, and flooding become disasters through their interaction with exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity [@adger2006vulnerability]. Disaster risk is therefore not simply a property of the hazard itself, but a condition produced through social relations, political-economic structures, and unsafe built environments [@wisner2004atrisk]. Environmental change may affect people’s lives directly, but its consequences are also mediated through broader economic, political, social, and demographic drivers [@black2011effect]. From this perspective, flood damage in Seoul should be understood not only as a hydrological or infrastructural outcome, but as a socially mediated process in which housing, infrastructure, poverty, and institutional protection shape who is harmed, how severely, and how repeatedly.
This perspective also complicates common assumptions about climate migration and adaptation. Climate risk does not automatically produce migration, and mobility is not always available as an adaptive response. Migration depends on both aspirations and capabilities: people may wish to move but lack the resources, rights, information, or social conditions that make movement possible [@dehaas2021theory]. Conversely, immobility should not be treated as the passive absence of migration. It can be produced through structural constraints, place-based attachments, and unequal access to mobility [@schewel2020immobility; @adams2016persist]. For this reason, recent climate mobility scholarship warns against simple narratives in which environmental change mechanically generates mass displacement [@boas2019myths]. In the context of urban flooding, the important question is therefore not only who is exposed to flood risk, but who has the housing-market capacity to leave.
Housing is central to this question. It is relatively intuitive that flood damage differs by dwelling type, elevation, drainage, construction quality, and neighborhood infrastructure. Yet an exclusive focus on the physical characteristics of vulnerable dwellings risks narrowing the analysis too much. A precarious dwelling is not only a structure with poor materials, old facilities, or unsafe locations; it is also a position within a broader housing market. Studies of Seoul’s jjokbang neighborhoods make this point especially clear. Jjokbang are extremely small and inadequate rooms that have functioned as one of the last residential safety nets for the housed poor in South Korea [@lim2023jjokbang]. Existing research has shown that residents of jjokbang-chon experience extreme weather not as isolated events but as part of a broader condition of everyday hardship, where “every day is a disaster” [@kang2024everyday]. Using the Pressure and Release framework, Kang and Lyles further show that climate vulnerability in jjokbang-chon is produced through the interaction of dangerous locations, unprotected buildings, fragile health, limited social networks, low income, and insufficient disaster preparedness [@kanglyles2025cooling]. These studies suggest that housing matters not only because some dwellings are more physically exposed, but because housing systems sort residents into unequal capacities to absorb, recover from, and move away from climate risk.
The Korean housing market adds another layer to this problem. Unlike rental systems in many Western contexts, South Korea’s rental market is structured around unusually large deposits, including jeonse and high-deposit monthly rent contracts. In a jeonse contract, tenants provide landlords with a large up-front deposit, often amounting to a substantial share of the property value, in exchange for paying no monthly rent [@kim2013chonsei]. More broadly, Korean rental contracts exist along a continuum of deposit-rent combinations, and these combinations are shaped by landlords’ expected returns and tenants’ costs of capital [@parkpyun2020rentdeposit]. Recent work further conceptualizes jeonse deposits as a form of interest-free credit from tenants to landlords, linking rental housing to financial markets and credit conditions [@jing2022credit]. In this institutional context, moving to safer housing is not simply a matter of finding a different dwelling or paying a different monthly rent. It often requires access to large deposits, the return of existing deposits, moving costs, brokerage fees, and credit. This paper therefore asks: How does housing precarity, embedded in Korea’s deposit-based rental market, shape both the magnitude and recurrence of flood vulnerability while constraining residents’ ability to move out of Seoul’s most precarious housing environments? I argue that flood vulnerability in Seoul is produced not only through hazardous locations or physically vulnerable dwellings, but through the interaction of climate risk, precarious built environments, and a deposit-based rental market that constrains adaptation and makes immobility more likely.